Optus 4G availability tops 90 percent: OpenSignal

Optus’ 4G network is available more than 90 percent of the time, the latest report from OpenSignal has said.

According to the mobile analytics company’s State of Mobile Networks: Australia report for November 2018, 4G availability — the proportion of time that OpenSignal users have a 4G connection available to them — was best on Optus, at a reported 90.49 percent.

“That means our users were able to find an LTE signal on Optus’ networks in nine out of every 10 attempts,” OpenSignal explained.

“Optus became the first operator in Australia to exceed 90 percent 4G availability in our results, but its two competitors were hot on its heels. Telstra and Vodafone both had 4G availability scores over 88 percent in our measurements.”

Optus, which had 10.2 million mobile customers by the end of October, had earlier on Thursday announced that its 4G population coverage reached 97.2 percent as of October 31, with 7,011 of its mobile sites upgraded to 4G and 5,990 of these upgraded to 700MHz spectrum.

The report, which saw OpenSignal collect 426 million measurements across 31,735 devices between July 1 and September 28, 2018, also saw Telstra again take out the fastest 4G download and upload speeds, at 40.11Mbps and 10.82Mbps, respectively.

It was followed by Optus, on 37.86Mbps download and 7.72Mbps upload; and Vodafone, on 37.58Mbps download and 8.66Mbps upload.

“Australia has always had a reputation for building powerful networks, and one network in particular began to rear its head in our latest analysis: Telstra jumped into the lead in our 4G download speed metric,” OpenSignal said.

“It won our award with an average download of 40.1Mbps, making it the first operator to cross over the 40Mbps threshold in our Australia analysis.

“In our last report, Vodafone came within a hair’s breadth of hitting the 40Mbps mark itself, but rather than make the final push over the line in this test period, Vodafone’s average 4G download speed dropped slightly in our measurements.”

However, Optus was the fastest on 3G download speeds, at 7.08Mbps on average, with Vodafone coming second at 6.07Mbps and Telstra last at 5.48Mbps.

Across Australia, Telstra provided the fastest overall download speeds in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth, and tied with Vodafone for Melbourne, the report said.

Latency was best on Vodafone, according to OpenSignal, sitting at 30.02 milliseconds on 4G and 50.76ms on 3G. Optus’ 4G latency was 30.99ms and its 3G latency 52.27ms; while Telstra’s 4G network latency was 38.38ms and 3G latency was 64.95ms.